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David Thaler

Bio

I study microbiology and genetics. A good way to get a sense of my work would be to read through the titles of my papers, of which there are about 40 in the reviewed literature. I’ve put a list on the web. Reprints for all are available by email request.

I look forward to this summer school as an opportunity for learning and interdisciplinary collaboration. My hope for deep interdisciplinary collaboration is not that people from different fields learn and work together to get things done that they could not accomplish alone. It is that collaboration allows and nurtures insights that no one of us, separately, could even conceive.

The human mind and body are complex systems, and all complex systems are profoundly affected by informational feedback. We hypothesize that changes in pupil size are a significantly underexploited source of self-knowledge as well as a potential source of knowledge of and empathy toward others. Pupil size is controlled by light, emotions, mental activity, memory formation, and other factors hypothesized to await discovery. The quantitative study of pupil size is currently the exclusive domain of professionals. We believe that the potential interest is much greater. Our hopeful hypothesis is that easily acquired and accurate pupillary information apps will lead to both entertainment and medical insight. Our hopeful hypothesis will be testable only if friendly yet precise data acquisition and analysis can be realized at vastly lower cost and greater convenience than currently available.